Poetry - Sivlia Curbelo

Born in Matanzas, Cuba, Silvia Curbelo emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was a child. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and over two dozen anthologies such as The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry (W.W. Norton), Snakebird: Thirty Years of Anhinga Poets (Anhinga Press), and Norton's Anthology of Latino Literature.

She has received the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs for poetry three times. In addition Curbelo has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Seaside Institute, the Writer's Voice, the Florida Arts Council and Cintas Foundation for her poetry. She won the Atlantic Center for the Arts Cultural Exchange Fellowship to La Napoule Arts Foundation in France. In 1996 Curbelo won the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.

Silvia Curbelo is published in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooney and Tampa Review in addition to others. She has authored three collections, The Geography of Leaving (Silverfish Review Press), The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press) and Ambush (www.mainstreetrag.com). The Secret History of Water was the inaugural volume of the Anhinga Press Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series. The most recent collection, Ambush, won the Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition. Curbelo currently lives and works in Tampa as an editor for Organica Quarterly.

Small Craft Warnings

When the day slips out of contextWhen wind shifts in its tracksand the sails fold in on themselves

When birds let go of their shadowsWhen weeds unlock a hidden gardenWhen the clouds part and the smoke clears

and the day stretches to its vanishing pointlike a story that begins in a house by a riverand ends anywhere the sky goes S. Curbelo

River Music

Let the water rise in you, let it fill all the spaces in your head, let itslip through your windows and doors, let itdrench everything you know, the room and all its ruined voices, the burned out couches and chairs, the television always on, let it drag itself through youtaking the river with it,its work song, its small humming,a prayer like an old shoe the current ferriesto the vanishing point, let it empty itself in you, a kind of thirst, an inkling, moth of light filling your mouth with wings, let the gravity of stones sink through itfor all the sleepless nights,pink slips, betrayals, the empty boat of your desires drifting in a place so deep the landslips away from its mooringsS. Curbelo

Weather Patterns

Sunlight forgives everything it touches, erasing every stone in its path. Salt on its palm,it cracks open the shell of any story, thick as kindness moving through the grass. But rain leaves no blade unturned. It lays a stubborn handon the horizon, pushing down.Into the ground. Into the darkearth. Where small things bloom. S. Curbelo

The Secret History of Water

In an attic room near the rivera child leans out the impossiblyhigh window to watch so much dark water going past. There is no true color for it.There is no precise word for it either. Say flood. Say stream. Say immeasurable thirst.You can feel it rising.

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